Looking for a (convenient) way to increase CPU real time performance

I work in both Audio and Video. Latency in video editing isn't really a problem but with audio editing where changes need to be real time, latency becomes a problem. When editing audio I peak at around 40% CPU usage and can render audio nearly 400% faster than real time but during real time play back while editing I frequently get pops and clicks if I load too many plugins or if I have too many tracks. I already know this is partially in part to my audio interface but the interface can only go as fast as the drivers permit and the drivers are pretty light weight to begin with.

My main concern is coming from how many things I need to have plugged into my computer. Given what I do, I have 3 monitors, 2 graphics cards, 1 external backup drive, 3 internal hard drives and a SSD, as well as the audio interface and all the dongles necessary for different software. The way it was explained to me is that the DAW struggles when it switches between tasks to write to a disk or any thing the CPU needs to process, that it briefly puts a pause on the CPUs power to the audio drivers devices and that leads to the pops, clicks, and driver crashes.

I very much need all my hard drives and dongles and monitors, so I am wondering if there is a way to reduce how much my CPU needs to switch back and forth to them and hopefully thus increase my real time performance.

I have more than sufficient cores and power on my CPU given that the non real time render turns 4 minutes of heavily processed audio into only 1 minute.... so theoretically there needs to be some way to increase real time performance as well.... Im just not sure what that way is that doesn't disturb the rest of my work flow and I am hoping someone here may have an idea.

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I should say I just ran LatencyMon and I am seeing an average latency around 60μs but I regularly see spikes to over 100 and according to the results I have a highest reported DPC routine execution time of 818μs... In general my average isnt that bad. I would hope to see it closer to the 20s-30s but in general not terrible. But this is also when Im not doing anything. If I press a button or change something on screen or really interact with the mouse in any way besides to move it, I see a spikes sometimes over 140μs which is really pushing where I would hope to see it.

I tried disabling my graphics cards and drivers and that had no impact on the performance.

Not 100% sure what the best way to go about disabling my harddisks is to test those but I suspect those arent helping anything. Still hoping someone with more experience may have some suggestions of what I can try. Someone suggested disabling IPV6 in the intel drivers and I dont know if thats really a good call or not so I would want a second opinion before I start playing around with network stuff but I will post a screen shot later from my device manager and maybe someone will spot some things I probably dont need.

What are you using to edit video?

Samuria said:

What are you using to edit video?

Are you referring to hardware or software? I use a 1080ti and 780ti for video and graphics and Adobe and AVID Media Composer for video. For Audio I use Cubase and Pro Tools and thats really where I notice the bottle necking because as mentioned, I need the audio to come back real time. I cant always sit on a 1000+ ms buffer time. Sometimes I need short 256 or faster ms buffer times and thats where pops and clicks start Theoretically something is occasionally sucking up the CPU resources for a sec and halting the prebuffer and causing a pop or click, and if the problem goes on too long then the ASIO drivers even sometimes crash and I need to restart the computer to be able to get everything running correctly again.

As mentioned. I tried disabling the video drivers and it made MAYBE a 5 micro second difference but really in total its hard to say for sure if thats due to the drivers. In general I didnt see a noticeable change from disabling them.

I also want to reitterate that my CPU usage is EXTREMELY low during editing. Sometimes as low as 30-40% and I will still be having issues which is why I suspect latency issues and not power issues.

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Here are some images to show a little bit of what im working with and in general its fair to just say im confused since im not used to reading information regarding latency.... the hardware part I get but surrounding the intel network stuff, I am a little worried to start tampering with it since I dont want to turn of something I might need and I really dont do too much with network related drivers.

I have a recording studio using an MOTU 4pre and Cakewalk Sonar or Studio One 4.5 Pro DAW's. At a 64 buffer my recording latency is 2.2ms.

I don't see your PC spec's published here which would help the discussion. But considering what you want to do, a specialized DAW desktop PC sounds like what you need. These are custom built to do specific tasks. I know one custom builder that builds systems such as this for commercial movie and TV video production and for commercial (and home) recording studio applications.

Contact Jim Roseberry at Studio Cat. Jim is very knowledgeable and helpful.

fireberd said:

I have a recording studio using an MOTU 4pre and Cakewalk Sonar or Studio One 4.5 Pro DAW's. At a 64 buffer my recording latency is 2.2ms.

I don't see your PC spec's published here which would help the discussion. But considering what you want to do, a specialized DAW desktop PC sounds like what you need. These are custom built to do specific tasks. I know one custom builder that builds systems such as this for commercial movie and TV video production and for commercial (and home) recording studio applications.

Contact Jim Roseberry at Studio Cat. Jim is very knowledgeable and helpful.

Ill look into it. The trickey part certainly would become a space issue. I have 2 much needed workstations in this space as is plus room treatment. Not a whole lot of space to pop a third and I cant sacrafice what I need for graphics as well. I first hand have seen computers do both just fine so I need to try and find out where the bottleneck specifically is happening.

In terms of specs,

I7-7700k
GTX-1080ti
GTX-780ti
64gb DDR4 Gskill Ram

Thats pretty much the extent without any peripherals. Last major upgraddes were performed about 3 years ago so it hasn't seen some love in a minute but I also am clocking high enough to render 20million poligons in real time and edit video but theoretically I should also be able to keep up with a faster audio DCP than what I have and I have watched people on dual core laptops with better scores than me. Im starting to suspect more and more it being hard drive related. Looking into getting another SSD probably to swap out with the second HDD and I can clone it over because I feel the HDD is probably acting like a bratty child

@Thornton: Your i7-7700K is just about the top of Intel's quad-core desktop offerings. It must be something else that's causing your latency.
You might consider posting this on a forum dedicated to music/audio production, like Gear Slutz. You'll find much help there. I did.

People with that kind of experience (like "fireberd", above) are rare on a general purpose site like this.
@fireberd: Are you on Gear Slutz? Or any other audio production board?
@Thornton: I, too, have an i7-7700K. But "only" one video card (1060). I use it for piano software, which is less taxing than the production work that you do.
But there's an interesting note: I sailed along smoothly with about 2 msec latency and no crackling for the first two years ... until suddenly I started having problems.

I'd be playing piano just fine, and then after around 15 minutes I'd have crackling. I'd restart Kontakt and the problem went away ... for around 15 minutes ... and then it reappeared. (BTW, all my pianos run inside of Kontakt.) Various online PC maestros suggested BIOS changes and talk of c-states and other techno jabberwocky. Nothing worked.

I thought perhaps I should upgrade my old version of Kontakt. That didn't help. But the new version has a new UI, so I poked around with it a bit. I accidentally clicked on the second "multi" slot ... and found some code there that I had tried out and forgot about. It was a MIDI monitor. It worked, but I decided I didn't need it. It got saved with that multi, and was forgotten.

So I removed the code from that multi slot. No more latency. It seems that the MIDI monitor script was hogging CPU cycles. Because when I deleted it the problem disappeared.
There was nothing wrong with Windows.
There was nothing wrong with the BIOS.
There was nothing wrong with the audio interface.
There was no slowness in the CPU.
There was no need to tweak and fuss.
It was just an errant piece of code.

The moral of this story: The problem often lies where you least expect.

Yes I'm on the Gearslutz forum as "fireberd". I've been on there almost 10 years. I'm also on the Dell support forums as "fireberd" and I've been on there long enough that I'm badged as one of the user techie's or as Dell calls us "Rockstars" (Rock for Round Rock Texas where the HQ is).

margrave55 said:

@Thornton: Your i7-7700K is just about the top of Intel's quad-core desktop offerings. It must be something else that's causing your latency.
You might consider posting this on a forum dedicated to music/audio production, like Gear Slutz. You'll find much help there. I did.

People with that kind of experience (like "fireberd", above) are rare on a general purpose site like this.
@fireberd: Are you on Gear Slutz? Or any other audio production board?
@Thornton: I, too, have an i7-7700K. But "only" one video card (1060). I use it for piano software, which is less taxing than the production work that you do.
But there's an interesting note: I sailed along smoothly with about 2 msec latency and no crackling for the first two years ... until suddenly I started having problems.

I'd be playing piano just fine, and then after around 15 minutes I'd have crackling. I'd restart Kontakt and the problem went away ... for around 15 minutes ... and then it reappeared. (BTW, all my pianos run inside of Kontakt.) Various online PC maestros suggested BIOS changes and talk of c-states and other techno jabberwocky. Nothing worked.

I thought perhaps I should upgrade my old version of Kontakt. That didn't help. But the new version has a new UI, so I poked around with it a bit. I accidentally clicked on the second "multi" slot ... and found some code there that I had tried out and forgot about. It was a MIDI monitor. It worked, but I decided I didn't need it. It got saved with that multi, and was forgotten.

So I removed the code from that multi slot. No more latency. It seems that the MIDI monitor script was hogging CPU cycles. Because when I deleted it the problem disappeared.
There was nothing wrong with Windows.
There was nothing wrong with the BIOS.
There was nothing wrong with the audio interface.
There was no slowness in the CPU.
There was no need to tweak and fuss.
It was just an errant piece of code.

The moral of this story: The problem often lies where you least expect.

Thanks for the thorough reply. I actually enjoyed it. Yeah 2 cards is a bit harder on the system but like I said, seemed to make no difference. The funny part is, I dont have as many latency problems in Pro Tools as I do Cubase. TBH that is an issue that gets into the software and I agree thats an issue better raised on gear slutz. I raised this question here mostly because im not 100% sure what I am looking at or how to intemperate the data from the driver info and the latency it is believed to be causing. I feel the hardware related side of this was better asked here. Hopefully thats how it's taken because the main reason for this post is to be hardware focused. Obviously it can be other things as well but given that my machine theoretically is faster than most lap tops I am curious why my DPC time is so much higher (I say in perspective to how low it can be, not how high it can be) although, I will take a look at the midi stuff also just because I am curious. And that had no effect on your midi input abilities at all? everything still records fine into a piano roll?

I also hear what your saying pretty heavy just because I can load probably 10 instances of Omnisphere and 15 instances of kontakt 5 in the same session no problems in FL but god forbid I say the words "5 instances of omnisphere" and cubase is already looking at me sideways. Again, all this besides the point. This post has more to do with, I know I want that latency lower and preferebly more stable.... how do I get it lower and more stable, and thats gonna come down to how I can make sure my hardware is interacting with the CPU how its supposed to and I want to be sure nothing is wrong that could be causing that or if I have anything floating around driver wise that I dont even need that can be turned off.